This discussion, between Kathleen Higgins and Matthew Ratcliffe is an interesting, and, I think, helpful insight into a phenomenology of grief [URL at the bottom].
I think it articulates some essential aspects, though not quite as vividly as Auden's 'Funeral Blues'.
It has helped me begin to realise the importance of ubuntu in grief.
We are mistaken to think our identity is unitary and independent of others. It is literally true that umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, a person is a person through people. 'Our' identity is not just 'ours', 'me','myself','I', it is a node in a dynamic network. We are part of others and they are part of us.
When somebody dies, the disturbance is so great and so long lasting, because as the article says, we cannot go home, because home is no longer there.
At least not the home that existed when the world was whole, the hole is a hole in our identity, that means that 'home' as it was cannot be 'home' as it is now, because the fabric of our self (as we imagine something belonging to us, but, actually, our part of the commonwheal) is not longer the same.
I think being from the West, where 'independence' is seen as more important than wholeness with all, it is more difficult to appreciate what ubuntu really means, literally. Language, narrative, and memes (as in Susan Blackmore's 'Meme Machine') make us, collectively, what we are.
Which is part of why grief seems so extreme, peculiar, unnatural, and ungrounded to us - we don't see it for what it is, because we try to interpret it personally, uniquely to our 'self', when it is our relationship to everything that makes us 'us' that has changed.
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